Sociolinguistic Futures between the UK and South Korea

在过去的四十年里，韩国和英国在语言的社会和文化分析方面都取得了重大进展。在社会语言学的集体保护伞下，领域已经扩大到包括批评话语分析、语言人类学、符号学、方言学、会话分析、语言人种学、应用语言学等领域。这些领域涵盖了广泛的主题，从对话和互动的微观分析到英语作为一种与阶级意识形态相关的技能在全球的传播。尽管英国和韩国的社会语言学家有着共同的学术渊源和话题兴趣，但他们几乎没有机会进行机构或研究合作。该网络项目旨在围绕与学术和公共领域日益相关的主题建立联系。这个项目将通过关注当代韩语的社会语言学及其跨国流动来实现这一点。现在是建立这样一个网络的好时机，原因有两个。首先，通过对韩国流行文化和媒体的兴趣，韩语学习在世界各地变得非常流行。这导致韩语和韩语研究课程的大学入学人数大幅增长，尤其是在英国。在谢菲尔德大学，韩国研究项目在过去10年里从每年招收不到5名学生增加到70多名学生。像南澳大学、爱丁堡大学、考文垂大学、曼彻斯特大学、纽卡斯尔大学和中央兰开夏大学等大学也发现，韩国学生对韩语和学习的兴趣急剧上升。学生接受高水平的语言培训以及文化、社会、历史和政治等学术领域的培训。为了反映这种增长，韩国政府机构最近在英国的韩语研究项目的发展上投入了大量资金。第二，近年来，韩国社会语言学的研究一直处于新兴课题的前沿。这些因素包括英语的全球化、语言作为一种技能的商品化、语言和学校教育、语言变体的地区和种族分层，以及以复杂方式将种族、语言和声望联系在一起的意识形态。此外，韩国高度城市化、全球流动和数字连接的社会预示着未来社会语言学分析的一些新兴趋势。这一背景包括混合青年登记册的兴起、全球南方与语言有关的移徙、多式联运、匿名数字平台和翻译社区。这些领域在韩国受到了普遍关注，一些学者还用韩语和英语进行了研究。随着数字技术和全球资本主义的传播，这些趋势将在全球范围内传播到更多背景下，来自韩国案例的知识可以开始为其他领域和学术设定议程。这些原因表明，英国和韩国学者和机构之间的研究和知识交流的新途径可能会产生广泛的影响。社会语言学未来网络不仅旨在将尚未有机会合作或分享见解的英国和韩国研究人员聚集在一起，还将为学生和早期职业研究人员建立寻求跨文化学习、研究和指导机会的途径。这些途径可能导致新的跨国和跨媒体研究项目，这些项目在未来几十年继续为社会语言学研究设定议程。

Both South Korea and the United Kingdom have been home to significant developments in the social and cultural analysis of language over the past forty years. Under the collective umbrella of sociolinguistics, fields have expanded to include areas of critical discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, semiotics, dialectology, conversation analysis, linguistic ethnography, applied linguistics, and others. These fields cover a wide range of topics, from the microanalysis of conversation and interaction to the global spread of English as a skill tied to class ideologies. While sharing intellectual origins as well as topical interests, sociolinguists in the UK and South Korean have had little opportunity for institutional or research collaboration. This network project aims to build connections around topics that are increasingly relevant for both academic and public domains. This project will do so by focusing on the sociolinguistics of contemporary Korean and its transnational movements.Now is an opportune time to build such a network for two reasons. First, the study of the Korean language has become hugely popular around the world, spread by interest in South Korean popular culture and media. This has led to huge growth in university enrolments in Korean language and Korean studies programmes, particularly in the UK. At the University of Sheffield, the Korean Studies program has grown from enrolling under five students enrolling per year to over seventy in the past ten years. Universities like SOAS, Edinburgh, Coventry, Manchester, Newcastle, and Central Lancashire have also seen a sharp rise in home student interest in Korean language and studies. Students receive high-level training in language as well as in academic areas of culture, society, history, and politics. Reflecting this growth, the South Korean government agencies have recently invested significant funding in the growth of Korean studies programmes in the UK.Second, research in South Korean sociolinguistics has been at the forefront of addressing emerging topics in recent years. These include the globalization of English, the commodification of language as a skill, language and schooling, regional and ethnic stratification of linguistic varieties, and ideologies that link ethnicity, language, and prestige in complex ways. Furthermore, South Korea's highly urbanized, globally mobile, and digitally connected society portends a number of emerging trends in the future of sociolinguistic analysis. This context includes the rise of hybrid youth registers, language-linked migration across the global South, multimodal communication, anonymous digital platforms, and communities of translation. These areas have received popular attention in South Korea as well as some scholarship in Korean and English. With the spread of both digital technology and global capitalism, these trends will spread to more contexts globally, and knowledge from South Korean cases can begin to set the agenda for other areas and scholars.These reasons suggest that new pathways of research and knowledge exchange between UK and South Korean scholars and institutions can have wide-ranging impact. The Sociolinguistic Futures network will not only aim to bring together researchers from the UK and South Korea who have not had opportunities to collaborate or share insights, but also establish pathways for students and early career researchers to pursue cross-cultural study, research, and mentoring opportunities. These pathways can lead to new transnational and transmedia research projects that continue to set agendas for sociolinguistic research in the coming decades.